Journal
APPLIED SOIL ECOLOGY
Volume 170, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.apsoil.2021.104300
Keywords
Synthetic microbial consortia; Microbial richness; Biodiversity ecosystem function; Plant growth promotion; Antagonistic effect
Categories
Funding
- National Key Research and Development Program [2017YFD0200805]
- Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China [BK20180539]
- National Science Foundation for Young Scientists of China [31801949]
- Priority Academic Program Development of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD)
- Innovative Research Team Development Plan of the Ministry of Education of China [IRT_17R56]
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Increasing microbial richness can improve plant biomass accumulation, indicating that diversity effects are stronger than single-strain effects. However, high antagonistic intensity between diverse microbes may have a consistent negative effect on plant growth, without altering positive BEF relationships.
Plant-related microbial communities are essential to plant growth and development, and empirical evidence suggests that inoculation with a synthetic microbial consortium can enhance plant performance; however, to manipulate the functions of these communities, we require a better understanding of the influencing factors. Here, we used the biodiversity ecosystem function (BEF) framework to specifically test the impact of community richness (1, 2, 4, or 8 strains per community) and antagonistic intensity on plant growth promotion in two kinds of nutritional environments. We found that increasing the richness of microbes can improve the accumulation of plant biomass, revealing that diversity effects were stronger than single-strain effects. The intensity of antagonism between highly diverse microbes may have a consistent negative effect on plant growth in comparison with the effects of communities with the same richness; intriguingly, this negative effect did not change positive BEF relationships. These results suggested that high diversity in the synthetic microbial consortia harboured stable and effective plant growth promotion capability and, in turn, also increased susceptibility to the negative effects of antagonism among microbial strains.
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